Many commercial applications, including financial management systems, payroll applications, customer relationship management systems, etc., utilize one or more database applications, e.g., Oracle Enterprise®, DB2®, MySQL® and SQL® Server, etc., to store and manage data in distributed storage systems. Enterprises worldwide spend billions of dollars annually in managing and administering these database applications and underlying storage infrastructure provided by the distributed storage systems. Database administration is the process of establishing computerized databases, and ensuring their integrity, recoverability, security, availability, reliability, scalability and performance.
Database administrators (“DBAs”) work with database management system software to organize, store and retrieve data. One of the primary responsibilities of a DBA is fine tuning performance of databases for high throughput/availability for enterprise applications. A DBA can fine tune various database parameters to improve performance of a particular database. However, a DBA has limited means to determine whether an observed performance bottleneck is due to the particular database's internals/layout or due to the underlying infrastructure, specifically the storage infrastructure that is hosting the data associated with the particular database.
Accordingly, known techniques for determining the performance of storage infrastructure associated with a database are limited in their capabilities and suffer from at least the above constraints and deficiencies.